Executive Summary

• This article is part of our honest vendor series, which is one of the only ratings of vendors rather than applications.
• The vendor quality is critical to the decision making process as software purchases have a high long term involvement by the software vendor.

Introduction

Intuit has been growing well for years but seems to have plenty of gas left in the tank. Intuit reports over ½ million businesses using their application worldwide – which would make them the number one SaaS enterprise business application.

The future for Quickbooks looks good as it does for all of the software vendors in this section. The days of mediocre financials functionality being used, simply because it came along with an ERP application may be within five years of being a significantly reduced feature of corporate America.

One of the most interesting things we will be keeping an eye on is what happens to the Quickbooks application ecosystem. Currently, the applications are a bit limited in scope, and several are of below-average quality, but in a few years that could drastically change.

Quality of Information Provided

The quality of the information provided by Intuit is of good quality. Intuit does not employ the large number of salespeople that other vendors that we cover do. This is because Intuit is still only a borderline enterprise software vendor (even though they have an enterprise software applications). Their margins are on the lower side, and much of the information they provide is through their website.

Consulting and Support

Consulting and support at Intuit are both above average. Intuit’s applications require much less handholding than almost any other application that we cover, and it is rare to hear complaints about either Intuit consulting and support.

Internal Efficiency

Many people do not know, but Intuit’s headquarters in Mountain View is right next to Google and is virtually indistinguishable from the Googleplex. Intuit even seems to have copied some of Google’s culture, down to providing free bicycles – although Intuit’s bicycles are blue, while Google’s are clown colors. With most software vendors there is a negative relationship between the size of the company and the employees’’ satisfaction (until one gets into the monopoly vendors like SAP and Oracle where the compensation is the best in the industry). However, Intuit breaks this trend by still having a motivated workforce.

Innovation

Quicken is a moderate innovator. Given their prominence, one might expect us to rate them more highly; however, if one investigates their applications, they are better priced and stable than actually innovative. However, they are still a perfect value vendor and an easy decision for small to medium businesses.

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